As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed “courageous whistleblowers” who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user’s messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app’s end-to-end encryption. “A worker need only send a ‘task’ (i.e., request via Meta’s internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job,” the lawsuit claims. “The Meta engineering team will then grant access – often without any scrutiny at all – and the worker’s workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user’s messages based on the user’s User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products.”

“Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users’ messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required,” the 51-page complaint adds. “The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated – essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted.” The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.

  • Jyek@sh.itjust.works
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    7 hours ago

    A lot of victim blaming in this thread. Why can’t you just be mad for someone who was deceived?

    • gustofwind@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      at what point is it someone’s responsibility to simply know better?

      this isn’t some complicated deceit it’s literally one of the most untrustworthy companies in the world lying to your face. A company we’ve known for now like two decades is untrustworthy and overtly harms people to make money

      do people have responsibility at all?

    • matlag@sh.itjust.works
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      6 hours ago

      Because it’s the gazillionth time the exactly totally absolutely same kind of shit happens with the very exactly same company that didn’t even try to hide who they were.
      And next week the very very same deceived people will be of Facebook, Instagram, etc. And maybe, just MAYBE they’ll migrate away from Whatsapp… to join another proprietary network of another billonaire’s controlled megacorp.

      Because I’m tired of being “that pain in the ass” when barely suggesting to use something else all to see at the end people crying over things they’ve be warned about.

      If a kid burns themself once on a kitchen’s hotplate, you assume they learnt their lesson in an unfortunate way despite all the warnings.
      If adults keep burning themselves over and over… and over and over and over, at which point are you entitled to say they’re part of the f*cking problem??

      • PhoenixDog@lemmy.world
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        51 minutes ago

        It’s like buying a hot dog from a gas station and not feeling awesome tomorrow.

        If you keep buying the hot dog every week, you see other people buying it and are fine, but you’re the only one getting sick week after week, at some point maybe you should just stop buying the hot dog.

        No one else is getting sick. They know what they’re getting. But you keep buying it expecting this time it’ll be different. And when it isn’t it’s the gas stations fault.

      • architect@thelemmy.club
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        6 hours ago

        I’m sick of Mark fucking zuckerberg.

        If i was the mad king of the usa all of those tech bros would be in a jail in el salvador.

        OH JUST USE SOMETHING ELSE!

        I do but that doesn’t stop that ugly weak fuck from stealing from my business every chance he fucking gets.